I’ve recently heard from a few people over the last year or two that, as link builders, we should only be focusing on links that drive traffic & revenue.

Earlier this week I watched a video posted on Twitter from Wil Reynolds, which you’ll find below. I have huge respect for Wil (interviewed him here in 2012; still worth a read), and in general, I believe that what he says in the community comes …

Note: if you just want to skip to my conclusions, you can find them here.

Recently, I had a bit of a breakthrough.

As we’ve expanded the agency, I was finally able to use our internal resources to build out & rank our own projects. I’ve always had the mindset of “drinking our own Koolaid”, and as we’ve gone down this path, I recently stumbled into a rabbit hole …

In this post we’re going to compare the most popular solutions for conducting & managing link building and/or PR outreach.

Which one should I use?

After my research & testing, it pains me to give such one-dimensional answers (cue waves of criticism), but since that’s what a lot of you are looking for, here’s the TL;DR version of what you should use:

At the heart of link building is attention to detail. If one item is out of place, then it could spell disaster for a campaign.

Therefore, it can be extremely helpful to learn what HASN’T worked. There are so many things that could go wrong, so it’s important to know what those things are, which is why I enlisted the help of some of the most brightest thinkers in the industry.

If you’ve built links before, then you know about the inevitable brick wall that you hit once you’ve run out of link prospects.

One of the two main ways of finding prospects, backlink analysis, yields some really low hanging fruit, because you’re finding pages that you already know are linking to the same / similar thing as you. But the well runs dry far too quickly.

Have you ever been so excited about something that you’ve had to consistently discipline yourself to keep from ruining the surprise?

Over the last 6+ months, I’ve been working on something specific to those who are building links for eCommerce websites, as I know the unique challenge these companies produce on the link building side of things. And it’s finally open to the world.